Hetmyer's efforts being recognised in dressing room- Ashwin

Ashwin lavished praise on the swash-buckling West Indian, saying that he has done well for the team this year and his efforts are recognised in the dressing room.

Hetmyer made an unbeaten 18-ball 28 that helped the Capitals cross the line on Monday.

Delhi Capitals off spinner Ravichandran Ashwin lavished praise on Shimron Hetmyer, saying that the swash-buckling West Indian has done well for the team this year and his efforts are recognised in the dressing room.

"I think more than about 6-8 points needs to go to Hety (Hetmyer), because he has finished games, sometime when you make those 25s and 30s, you don’t quite get the recognition you must, because people are at the top are making the volume of runs,” Ashwin said at the virtual post-match press conference.

“So Hetymer is one of those heroes for us and inside that dressing room, we recognise all these efforts, so yeah, he is in a good space,” added the wily off-spinner.

According to Ashwin he has been batting well, ever since he came to the UAE from England.

“...I have been batting well and there was a lot of confidence from what happened in the last game, I was little late, I was probably not ready for the ball and little late on the ball and didn’t expect sort of a delivery from him and could have done better, yeah I will learn and move on from it,” the star Tamil Nadu player added.

Ashwin, who has taken five from 10 games this season, said he was satisfied and happy with the way he was bowling.

"There are 24 deliveries that I am allowed to bowl in a game and sometimes I kept on repeating this again and again, to look to go for wickets is not something that you can do in a T20 game, you have to play (to) the situation of the game, my job is to bowl to the best of my abilities in those 24 balls and create wicket-taking opportunities.

“So sometimes, I feel it is too lop-sided in trying, you can’t put a short-leg, slip, you can’t look to attack and try and get a wicket, so I think the way the ball is coming out and the way I am bowling, I am extremely satisfied and happy."

Not a personal battle with Morgan but difference of opinion During last week's IPL match against Kolkata Knight Riders, Ashwin had tried to take a run after a throw ricocheted off his batting partner Rishabh Pant's body. KKR captain Eoin Morgan and Ashwin then had an altercation with Morgan calling the Indian a "disgrace" and accusing him of not adhering to the 'Spirit of Cricket' despite the fact that MCC rules allow scoring of runs after rebound from a batsman's body. Looking to end the controversy, Ashwin said,"Look, I think it's definitely not a personal battle or one on one battle and I wouldn't deem it like that at all. People who want attention may be taking it that way, but I am not looking at it that way at all." "...I was not the one who was aware that it had hit Rishabh (Pant). So I just felt like they had already decided they were going to have a go, and that is one of the reasons why I said the words that were used were not in the right direction and not in the right space," he explained. In his Twitter posts after that game, Ashwin had asked Morgan and Tim Southee to not use "derogatory" words and lecture him on 'Spirit of Cricket' by taking a moral high ground. "I think we need to understand that culturally everybody is different right, the way people are taught to play cricket in England and in India, the way one thinks is completely different," Ashwin said. "I wouldn't say that there is anybody that is wrong here. It is just that the way the game was played in 1940s, cannot be the same way that you want somebody else to apply it (now)," he said.

Fleming defends Dhoni; praises Delhi bowling

Chennai Super Kings head coach Stephen Fleming defended skipper Mahendra Singh Dhoni after the loss.

The former New Zealand skipper also said that his side was 10-15 runs short of a match-winning total.

“He (Dhoni) wasn’t the only one. It was a difficult day for stroke-play when 137 was almost enough, it was a tough wicket to score big on, in terms of big shots. So, both the teams struggled with that towards the end of the innings. Probably we were only 10-15 runs short of having a match-winning score,” Fleming said.

“So, that is the difficulty at the moment, is trying to assess what the conditions are in all three different grounds and batting first getting a score, that’s par of just above.

"The other thing was Delhi attack bowled very well, the last five overs were very smart, so it was tough going,” he said.